At first when I heard Rory McIlroy was considering leaving driver in his locker for this week’s DP World India Championship I thought he was speaking figuratively. Leaving it in his locker as in not using it much. But then when he showed up for his first-round tee time it turned out that he had very literally taken driver out of his bag. Second round? Same thing. And it makes sense, when you hear him explain it. But we’ve also never seen this from Rory before. So let’s talk through why this is interesting.
(Let’s talk through some other stuff, too.)
1. Rory has never done this before.
He first teased it in his pre-tournament press conference.
“I’d say the next time I hit my driver will be in Abu Dhabi,” he joked, referring to his next tournament start. But in fact it wasn’t a joke. “I don’t think I’ll hit a driver this week. I just don’t feel like the risk is worth the reward. I’d rather leave myself two or three clubs back and hit a 7-iron into a par-4 instead of hitting a wedge, where if you just get it off-line here, the ball is gone. You’re hitting it into jungle and you’re not going to be able to get it out. You can rack up a very big number very quickly.”
Then came his comments after the first round — his first professional round without his most famous club (and its trademark dog headcover).
“Dog was out of the bag, probably asleep in the locker,” he said. “Yeah, I was sort of thinking about it last night before I went to bed. Sometimes if you’re really conservative off a par-5, you might have like a 5-wood into the green, but I’m never going to hit driver, so I just thought I’ve got to go 2-iron, 3-iron, 4-iron all the way through, and then I’ve got a 5-wood just in case I need to hit it for an approach shot on a par-5. But I just don’t see any hole out there that I hit to hit it more than say 260, 270 off the tee.”
2. My buddy has, though.
I have a close pal who has taken driver out of the bag just because he knows that if it’s in there, at some point he will be tempted to hit it, he will then drive the ball out of play and he will start having a bad time. McIlroy is basically doing the same thing. He just happens to hit his long irons about 80-100 yards past my buddy, who’s a 20 handicap.
3. Then again, he’s never done any of this before.
This is McIlroy’s first time in India and it’s one of the higher-profile tournaments in the nation’s golfing history. It seems like a win-win from each side; McIlroy has for multiple years expressed his interest in playing here and he continues to find joy in new golf tournaments around the world. And because the DP World Tour has a more lenient policy around appearance fees, it’s safe to assume that McIlroy and his high-profile peers are being well-compensated for their time this week.
4. The numbers tell a fascinating story
Through two rounds the average driving distance for the India Championship is just over 265 yards on its measured holes. That is wild when you consider the PGA Tour’s average driving distance is 303.3 yards. McIlroy’s no-driver strategy still has him in the top half, averaging 270.25 yards. But that’s more than 50 yards behind his 323-yard average. There’s a wide range in strategies, though: Thriston Lawrence of South Africa went bombs away en route to a 308-yard average through two rounds, with the average-length Brian Harman just behind him at 299.5 yards a pop.
As for McIlroy’s accuracy? He has hit 75 percent of his fairways, good for T17 in the field and miles ahead of his 51.2 percent PGA Tour average. The tradeoff is pretty clear.
5. The visuals do, too.
If you spend any time watching the India Championship on TV (and I recommend it, particularly if you live in the U.S. and you’re an insomniac) you’ll quickly see why these guys are laying so far back — the course is in the middle of New Delhi, the second-most-populous city in the world, but it’s also essentially cut into a jungle. The corridors are narrow and missing spells doom.
6. For that matter, the sounds tell a fascinating story.
You can hear sounds of the city come through on every minute of the broadcast — and even on the fun social clips the DP World Tour has been posting. We often hear about how courses are in major cities when in fact they’re on the quiet outskirts of quiet suburbs, but not here! It’s worth embracing the extent to which this course is in the mix.
7. He’s still losing to his straighter-hitting pals
It’s no shock that this course would set up well for McIlroy’s two closest friends on Tour, given their statistical profiles; Tommy Fleetwood (who leads at 12 under through 36 holes) has slightly below-average length but is one of the straightest drivers in the world and an incredible irons player. You could say something similar about Shane Lowry (11 under, T2) who is notably straight off the tee and notably elite with an iron in hand from the fairway.
“There’s a lot of holes where you’re not hitting much off the tee and you’re trying to get it in play and that’s why I think it suits me,” Lowry said. “There’s a lot of mid-irons out there which a strength of my game.”
8. This is the golf experiment we’ve been waiting for.
People in and around pro golf think and talk obsessively about distance. Whether pros hit it too far, whether golf courses are too short, what anybody can do about any of it. This week is certainly one example of how to de-emphasize distance as a skill; accuracy off the tee is essential to success, while driver has been effectively outlawed. And the players seem tickled by the test.
“It’s great. We spoke about it quite a bit out there — it’s just such a unique challenge for all of us,” Fleetwood said. “I haven’t hit more than a 5-wood. The one hole where I could hit more is 18, but you get to that and you’re like, ‘Well, I haven’t hit one, and I don’t really feel that comfortable with it.’ It’s such a unique challenge, and the greens are firming out a little bit and the pins have been tricky.
“It’s been very, very enjoyable. It’s a test of patience when you’re not quite on it because like it’s one of those courses, you get a few of them where you feel — if you hit it good off the tee you’re going to have some short irons and wedges and feel like you’ve always got a chance to get it wrong. It’s such a waiting game. You’ve got to be very patient. It’s been a great test.”
9. It’s also a reminder for us.
I live in Seattle, where many courses present as bowling alleys. But I’m so conditioned to seeing the pros hit driver or 3-wood everywhere that I assume if they showed up here they’d do the same. This is evidence to the contrary. Even through analytics have steered pros towards a bomb-and-gauge style of play in recent years, there are limits to that strategy when courses become tight enough and misses become penal enough. So yeah — it’s okay to lay back off the tee if it means you’re going to keep it in play. Not much fun getting stuck in the jungle all day, anyway.
10. Sports rule.
I spent my Thursday night watching Joe Flacco trade punches with Aaron Rodgers in one of the more memorable regular-season matchups in recent NFL history — and then eventually flipped over to catch the sights, sounds and strategies of the India Championship. Sports remain the best thing going because they deliver the unexpected. Let’s go back to McIlroy’s pre-tournament press conference for the final word:
“I would say that deep down at its core, the essence of watching sport, it’s the realest reality show that we have. We don’t know the outcome. We don’t know what’s going to happen, and that’s amazing. There’s very little content on TV nowadays that can actually do that.”
Two more intriguing rounds in this latest episode.
Dylan Dethier welcomes your comments at dylan_dethier@golf.com.
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